Addiction is always a tricky thing to talk about in children’s cartoons, because while it’s absolutely important to make children (and adults!) aware of the risks and consequences, they also often tend to underplay how difficult it actually is to let go of an addiction, or simply make the message about saying “no” in the first place. It’s understandable: you only have twenty-odd minutes to show a message, and if it’s not a continuing plotline, you also have to spend some time introducing the threat.
“Happiness Is…” played a lot of the addiction plotline straight–narcotic shows up, the kids have fun with it, then they realize it’s bad and flush it down the toilet. We’ve all seen the Greendale play. But one of the things that this episode played a little differently was showing a character wrestling with the addiction on her own, and sounding out a lot of familiar talking points.
The final line here–”What is so wrong with something that makes me happy?”–is a particularly beautiful marriage of boarding and scripting because you can see how angry she is. Rapunzel is all alone in the woods, yelling at her lifelong companion and conscience about how happy she is.
Because that’s the thing about addictions: they don’t make you happy. They just make sure you feel miserable. Sure, you feel euphoria and satisfaction for a few minutes or hours when you hit that substance and give yourself that high, but there are twenty-four hours in a day, and that adds up to almost fifteen hundred minutes: you can’t fill all of them with the drugs, and if you do, you die. The rest of them are steadily spent spiraling and inching back toward that craving. And when you return to whatever you’re addicted to–drugs, alcohol, pornography, food, a magical object that shows you your parents–you only think you’re feeling happy because it’s an exit from that void that the narcotic has convinced you exists. It’s all an illusion…but it’s also not. Chemicals and brain patterns make it real, and that’s why addictions are ridiculously hard to break. For all we know Rapunzel could be waking up in a cold sweat for days regretting smashing that idol (though its magical properties might have circumvented anything chemical, so maybe she’ll be fine).
But perhaps the most distinguishing factor of this particular addiction episode was that there was no villain besides the idol–and Rapunzel herself. No one dropped an idol on her head with a sinister laugh, no one sold it to her, it was something Rapunzel went out and found all by herself. This wasn’t some “drugs are something other people do, don’t get involved” plotline, it was a “you may find your way to something unpleasant, but remember that you have a social life and people who love you, please turn to them for help whenever you’re down” kind of message. This was Rapunzel’s dilemma from start to finish, and overall, it was a very introspective journey–something that’s difficult to pull off in a cartoon, but that this episode succeeded in, anyway.
There’s more addiction discussion to have regarding this episode, too–from how creepy and unsettling Rapunzel’s slipping-down-the-slope face is (gonna have to gif that whole sequence because it’s terrifying) to how easily the others got hooked and how harmless it seemed at the start, but that’s another post. The point is, folks: if you’re having a problem with addiction, there’s no easy quick-fix. That’s not the moral of this episode, it’s not trying to be a panacea or a guidebook. It’s here to show the different facets of addiction and dependence, and to remind you that it’s hard work that you cannot do alone. If you are having a problem, talk to someone. It helps. Find a confidante, find a forum, trust the people who love you. Running into the woods and talking to yourself about how it makes you happy is not as productive as you think.
Stay safe out there, and God Bless.
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